Partnerships for Public Sector Solutions

Posted on by Mike McCalip

Systems integrators have evolved to simplify and streamline the process of deploying complex solutions to complex agency challenges. SIs have years of experience working with agencies on the kinds of systems that have many moving parts. Therefore, they have a clear understanding of agency missions and know how to navigate the government’s procurement process. However, SIs don’t work alone. They thrive by partnering with companies that have transformative new approaches for addressing the government’s needs, such as providing innovative digital services, supporting a hybrid workforce and protecting government networks from cyberthreats. In a recent report, research firm Quadintel states that the global systems integration market was valued at $327 billion in 2021 “and is anticipated to grow with a healthy growth rate of more than 13% over the forecast period 2022-2028.” SIs are well-suited to helping agencies make that shift in thinking. Learn how Sis can help your agency thrive by partnering with innovative companies in Carahsoft’s Innovation in Government® report.

The Power of Embracing a Partner Mindset

“Success for integrators and their partners is delivering secure solutions that provide meaningful and impactful mission outcomes. Leidos invests heavily in testing and building relevant solutions for public-sector customers to ensure that innovative technologies are cost-effective, resilient, compliant with government requirements and best positioned to solve mission problems. Investing in a continuous innovation cycle is critical. Leidos and Red Hat recognize that we are in the business of continuous modernization. When Red Hat and other key partners offer innovative new solutions, our partnerships enable us to move fast in testing and proving that the technology works and can scale to meet the government’s needs. Leidos leverages innovative technology to drive great mission outcomes in our Aviation Security Product business unit (Security Enterprise Solutions). By using cloud-native AI/ML modeling solutions, Leidos had been able to achieve significant performance gains in our process for developing algorithms for security detection products, ultimately improving travelers’ experiences at airports.”

Read more insights from Peter O’Donoghue, CTO of the Civil Group at Leidos, and Adam Clater, chief architect of the North America Public Sector at Red Hat.

A Collaboration That Far Exceeds the Sum of its Parts

“In 2020 KMPG and ServiceNow recognized that a large and newly formed Defense Department agency was facing a number of challenges in its efforts to transform its business, consolidate systems and processes, and modernize its technology. We began having conversations with the executive leadership and department heads across different lines of business to gain a clear understanding of their mission, current challenges and desired outcomes. As the ServiceNow program was being established at the agency, the customer required a robust governance and platform team to ensure utilization of development best practices and policy generation, platform management activities (e.g., upgrades) and a secure, scalable, federated development model. This technical rigor and governance structure supported the creation of a stable environment in which application development teams could configure and deploy new, unique applications rapidly.”

Read more insights from Kyle McKendrick, senior enterprise account executive at ServiceNow, and Daniel Gruber specialist managing director at KPMG.

Driving Modernization with Deep Strategic Partnerships

“In response to the challenges agencies face, Leidos has been focused on building deep strategic partnerships that help us create at-scale solutions for our government customers. These partnerships are characterized by a commitment to open lines of communication and transparency in terms of strategy and investments. We also operate in what we describe as a badgeless environment in which experts from different companies work side-by-side to engineer new capabilities and solutions.”

Read more insights from Derrick Pledger, senior vice president and CIO at Leidos.

Why Success in Zero Trust Requires a Team Effort

“Zero trust focuses on the connection between users and the data, applications, networks and systems they want to access. In zero trust architectures, new administrative tools continually evaluate whether allowing an individual user to have a certain level of access privileges is the right thing to do. The approach gives agencies much more flexibility as they modernize because they can make decisions at a granular level that enable them to secure data and entire IT ecosystems.”

Read more insights from Meghan Good, vice president and director of the Cyber Accelerator at Leidos.

How Multi-Domain Operations Accelerate Modernization

“By design, multi-domain operations must involve a broad range of partners to achieve the desired mission outcomes, particularly as threats continue to rapidly evolve. Making such a shift allows military and civilian agencies to far more rapidly add new capabilities to individual systems. The approach also enhances agencies’ ability to partner with industry to harness the power of cross-domain, cross-agency and even cross-company digital synergies.”

Read more insights from Chad Haferbier, vice president of multi-domain operations solutions at Leidos.

Balancing Speed and Security with SecDevOps

“As one of the largest systems integrators, Leidos understands the government’s mission domain and individual agencies’ unique challenges. We also know where they are in their evolution. Some are still easing toward agile and SecDevOps, whereas others have fully embraced those approaches. Our partners in the commercial world are some of the fastest, most forward-leaning technologists.”

Read more insights from Paul Burnette, vice president and director of the Software Accelerator at Leidos.

Download the full Innovation in Government® report for more insights from SI cloud thought leaders and additional industry research from FCW.

3 New Ways to Integrate Microsoft Teams with Your Purpose-built Technical Collaboration Platform

Posted on by Barry Duplantis

Technical and operational team members rely on a broad range of specialized tools: GitLab, Jira, Jenkins, ServiceNow, Zendesk, and many others. Meanwhile, their colleagues across the organization may also use general-purpose solutions such as Microsoft Teams. In fact, many of your people involved in application development, IT operations, and other technical workflows need to stay connected to Teams. And that presents some opportunities.

Microsoft Teams provides a useful all-employee meeting and chat experience. But it can’t deliver the features your technical and IT teams need, such as:

Built-in integrations with specialized developer and technical tools
Project- or topic-specific channels for in-context conversations
Customizable playbooks or digitized checklists to optimize technical workflows
Ironclad security for mission-critical workflows connecting to sensitive systems

Mattermost for Microsoft Teams Collaboration Blog Embedded Image 2023

For these capabilities, smart organizations rely on a purpose-built technical collaboration platform. An effective collaboration platform provides a single plane of glass that gives all team members a unified environment for information sharing, project tracking, and both real-time and asynchronous collaboration.

Fortunately, organizations now have an effective means of integrating Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 into their technical and operational processes. Mattermost for Microsoft Teams enables technical users to stay connected to Teams while collaborating in a highly customized and secure collaboration environment.

In particular, three innovative capabilities can equip your organization to turbocharge Teams integration and accelerate your technical workflows:

Secure, customizable Teams messaging extension: The Teams messaging extension allows technical users to collaborate in secure shared channels across the Mattermost and Teams experiences. Users can take advantage of integrated voice, video, screen share, and calendar across the two platforms. They also get unified user management and authentication through Azure Active Directory and Active Federation Services single sign-on. The extension allows Teams users to connect to hundreds of technical and developer systems, along with custom in-house tools, by using their technologies of choice.
Private communications mode for sensitive content: A private communications mode ensures strong security for your sensitive data and technical intellectual property (IP). With this capability, you retain complete control of all messages and files sent. You can optionally store data outside the Teams environment in your own encrypted databases in private or public clouds, including Microsoft Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
Business continuity mode during Teams outages: Mattermost for Microsoft Teams can be deployed in private or public clouds independent of Azure. That means you can now maintain vital communications, security, and resiliency functions during an outage of Microsoft 365.

With these features, you have new capabilities to optimize collaboration for technical and operational teams. Centralized IT functions can give your technical teams an extended customization experience while enabling them to remain firmly integrated into the all-employee Teams and Microsoft 365 platforms.

Through the integration of Mattermost and Teams, your technical operators can stay connected to nontechnical stakeholders. Yet within the same environment, they also have direct access to the webhooks, slash commands, custom plugins and apps, automations, workflow orchestration, and project management they need.

Technical and operational users can now leverage Teams while collaborating in a customizable environment – with the security, specialized tools, and purpose-built automations that optimize your mission-critical workflows.

View our demo on integrating Mattermost with Microsoft Teams.

Overcoming Data Challenges With Virtualization

Posted on by Paul Leavoy

Despite the variation in their individual mandates, all regulatory agencies have one main objective: to protect the public. However, there are hurdles to this goal. There are heavy costs associated with data warehousing, as large projects require extensive telecommunication and server space. This can be both expensive and time-consuming. Luckily, by implementing data virtualization tools, agencies can overcome these constraints and provide more effective services.

What is Data Virtualization?

Data virtualization is an approach to data management that helps organizations accelerate the turnaround time for converting data into digestible information. These data sources can range from a variety of locations, including distributions and data stores and any documents, emails or spreadsheets an agency has. With such a wide array of data, accessing and understanding all vital information can be both time-consuming and overwhelming. Data virtualization is necessary to streamline access to the answers and information agencies and users require.

How It Works

Data virtualization software begins by creating a layer over or around all existing data sources in an organization. Through its complementary interface, the software outputs the needed information. This process saves an abundance of time that is otherwise spent reading labels and searching for a single piece of information.

Another major benefit is that data virtualization software creates a layer of abstraction between the data source and what the user ultimately sees. The software arranges heterogeneous data from all the different sources across an organization, and then quickly presents it to the user. By properly interacting with the data sources, data virtualization software ensures that all data sources are correctly represented. This way, users can receive sufficient context behind the information they are accessing.

Boons that Enhance Virtualizing Servers

Typically, data virtualization exists between the user and their vast array of data sources. Virtualizing tools have several benefits. They:

Reduce the processing time and cost
Provide the same opportunity to accomplish a variety of goals and objectives
Reduce expenses associated with data integration

In addition to these numerous advantages, virtualizing servers have the same security benefits that any other IT system has. For one, data servers exist on a single network, and are isolated from potential threats. Servers have network isolation and segmentation to prevent the unnecessary cross of information. With granular access control, users can implement micro-segmentation to further this boon. Lastly, by maintaining updates and new security patches, virtualizing servers can stay up to date with the latest cybersecurity practices. For a professional licensing agency, it is always beneficial and necessary to take steps to secure their software. Additional steps don’t need to be taken to protect virtualizing servers.

Choosing the right data virtualization software

The process of implementing data virtualization can be daunting at first. As each organization differs in the types of information it collects and how that information is categorized, data virtualization will also differ. However, there are a few elements that regulatory agencies should consider. First, regulators should determine the setup/layout of their existing organization structure. Questions to consider include:

What existing technology is owned?
What systems are being worked with?
What are the agency’s needs?
What are the agency’s top priorities?

All these factors contribute to how data virtualization is implemented. Once the respective regulator reaches a higher end of technological maturity, it should begin looking into fully implementing data virtualization. With the proper virtualization software, regulators can swiftly sift through information.

Data virtualization servers reduce time, resources and cost for regulators

For a variety of agencies, data virtualization can greatly streamline and improve their access to information. By transforming manual systems into a digital, accessible process, virtualization servers reduce time, resources and cost for regulators in their ongoing work to best utilize data to aid the public.

To learn more about Thentia’s data virtualization solutions, visit our website.

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Tag Archives: DevSecOps